Lifesaving Poems: Charles Simic’s ‘My Shoes’

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It was the best of times. Jean Sprackland and I were tutoring the dream group at Totleigh Barton for a week. As anyone who has done an Arvon course knows, the talk was all about writing poems, how we went about our writing, where our ideas came from, who we were reading and who we knew or had worked with. This went on pretty much continuously, over breakfast, coffee and dinner.

Only recently I said to one of the participants I am still in touch with that I am still learning from it eight years later. This was not meant flippantly.

I remember the last workshop Jean gave, right at the end of the week, on four of Charles Simic’s poems. I had read Simic before, in anthologies and had also come across him at workshops. Though I did not know why, I didn’t really feel I had got him yet. Happily, Jean’s workshop changed all that.

She handed out a photocopied sheet with four of Simic’s poems on it, all taken from a back issue of the LRB. I still have my notes from the session. They say things like ‘secret objects’, ‘personal’, ‘speed→cutting through’ and ‘everyday’. Looking at them from this distance, they have the shock of appearing as a kind of shorthand ars poetica.

Via Jean’s careful explication I now felt I had access to Simic’s strange merging of the language of religion (‘inner life’, ‘Gospel’, ‘existence’, ‘humility’, ‘church’, ‘altar’, ‘patience’ and ‘Saints’) with that of earth (‘shoes’, ‘face’, ‘mouths’, ‘skins’, ‘mice’, ‘birth’, ‘earth’, ‘oxen’). The chiming assonance of several of these (‘patience’ with ‘Saints’; ‘shoes’ with ‘face’ and ‘mice’; ‘birth’ with ‘earth’) is persuasive and seductive.

‘My Shoes’ is also deeply political. In an era when we share the minutiae of ‘inner lives’, directly and indirectly making them available to all who would listen, Simic implicitly seems to argue for a core self which is irreducible and which cannot be known or ‘read’.

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Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems, based on the blog of the same name, is available from Bloodaxe Books. Love for Now, my memoir of cancer, is published by Impress Books. Deck Shoes, a book of prose memoir and criticism, and The Afterlife, my fifth book of poems, are available now from Impress Books and Worple Press. My current research project is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.
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